The Tomb of the Artisan God Quotes

“According to the Phaedo, to philosophize is to learn to die. It is thus to learn to return to the world this ideality that the demiurge will never be able to definitively inscribe within its sensible body.”
― Serge Margel, The Tomb of the Artisan God: On Plato's Timaeus

“In the ideal impossibility that paradoxically represents its greatest perfection, the world would at once become the sensible image (εἰκών) of the gods and an object of worship (ἄγαλμα) offered to the memory of their immortality. The world, in the universality of its totality, would have been mimetically produced as a votive object, an object henceforth destined to offering, gift, and sacrifice. This is what we will call the tomb of the artisan god.”
― Serge Margel, The Tomb of the Artisan God: On Plato's Timaeus

“Ὑποδοχή comes from the verb δέχεσθαι, which means to receive, welcome, shelter, accept: its translation by “receptacle” is thus apt on a number of levels. It is the site where one receives, where one shelters, where one seeks refuge and asylum, such as the guardian of the laws in a sacred temple.”
― Serge Margel, The Tomb of the Artisan God: On Plato's Timaeus

“One can thus say, as a matter of consequence, that it was by placing and by distributing the soul into the body of the world—and thereby observing that it was nevertheless impossible to fully close the gap between the sensible and the intelligible—that he represented this world to himself in the form of the heavens.”
― Serge Margel, The Tomb of the Artisan God: On Plato's Timaeus

“Brague proposes the following “explanatory translation”: He had the idea of making a mobile image of the noetico-numerical content of the Living Thing [du Vivant]. He thus granted an ordered distribution to the whole of the heavenly bodies. In so doing, he built an image of this content. So while the content remains in its place, the heavens that are its image advance according to the number expressing this content, this number we call time. (Du temps chez Platon et Aristote, 61)”
― Serge Margel, The Tomb of the Artisan God: On Plato's Timaeus

“This image thus was not first and foremost a degraded form of the model, nor even a conforming copy, but it determines the reflexive relation of representation that the demiurge’s noetic aim (his νόησις) undertakes with respect to the intelligible content of its projection (its νόημα, or the ideality of the model). This image moreover constitutes the exact representation the demiurge makes to himself of his productive act, or more precisely, of the relation, indeed the gap between his projection and its ideal object.”
― Serge Margel, The Tomb of the Artisan God: On Plato's Timaeus